Marketing analytics tools will help you understand what’s working well for your campaigns, diagnose issues, and identify areas needing extra attention. Data is a marketer’s best friend, but not all data is created equal, and knowing which metrics to monitor can make the difference between success and failure.
In this article, I will go over the best marketing analytics tools available on the market today, give a brief overview for each, go into the unique strengths of each tool, give some top level pros and cons, and provide pricing information. This marketing analytics tool comparison should make it easier to choose what works for you.
Best Marketing Analytics Tools Shortlist
Here’s the shortlist of the best tools that I’ll cover in this article.
- Google Analytics
- Adobe Analytics
- Salesforce Analytics Cloud
- HubSpot
- Mixpanel
- Kissmetrics
- Amplitude
- Crazy Egg
- Heap
- Optimizely
- Hootsuite Insights
- SEMrush
What are Marketing Analytics Tools?
Marketing analytics tools are software that in-house marketers and marketing agencies use to handle significant amounts of data and turn them into visual, actionable insights. Two out of three leading marketers say data-driven decisions are superior to those based on gut instinct. Typically, marketing analytics tools display data related to various marketing strategies, such as pay-per-click (PPC), social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), or ecommerce campaigns.
Marketing analytics platforms can help marketers improve efforts and prove their value with the end goal of increasing campaigns’ effectiveness while justifying costs. Marketing professionals typically use these analytics tools to connect and understand data in one centralized area. Also, these platforms can turn complex numbers and data into visual elements, such as graphs, charts, and bars, that marketers can understand easier.
Overviews of the 12 Best Marketing Analytics Tools
You can use the simple overviews of each tool below to understand how each tool stands out from other marketing analytics tools.
1. Google Analytics - Best for website traffic analysis
Google Analytics allows businesses to monitor and track website traffic to help them see where they’re coming from, what they’re doing, and when they leave.
Why I picked Google Analytics: The platform can help you get robust insights about your website, audience, and digital marketing. Google Analytics is a popular tool that you can use to track your website’s traffic in real-time. It can give you insights into audience metrics, traffic acquisition sources, and conversions.
Google Analytics is a popular choice for organizations that need a tool to help visualize data and business intelligence. Its features are adaptable and powerful enough to help you identify marketing channels that are giving you the best results for your team’s efforts. When using Google Analytics, you can view almost any marketing metric, including bounce rate, goal completions, and top acquisition channels, to help you get a complete understanding of your site’s performance.
Google Analytics Standout Features and Integrations
Features include predictive capabilities, proactive insights, privacy-safe modeling, real-time reporting, acquisition reports, engagement reports, monetization reports, advertising attribution, funnel exploration, segment overlap, and automatic custom tables.
Integrations include Accelevents, CallTrackingMetrics, Freshservice, GetResponse, HoneyBook, Improvado, LiveAgent, Mailchimp, Orange Logic, Rambox, Salesforce, SendGrid, Zapier, Zendesk, Zoho CRM, and other software options.
Google Analytics is free to use.
Pros
- It tracks in-depth visitor behaviors
- Easy to implement
- It’s simple to execute event configurations
Cons
- It’s challenging to sort through all the data
- The user interface is complex
2. Adobe Analytics - Best for marketing attribution
Adobe Analytics provides data attribution capabilities to help businesses identify which campaigns are resulting in conversions.
Why I picked Adobe Analytics: The platform uses a range of tools, such as marketing analytics, multi-channel data collection, and web analytics, to help you measure and understand your campaign’s impact. Adobe Analytics can monitor and analyze marketing data streams and convert the details into real-time, actionable insight. It uses rules-based and algorithmic attribution models to help you see behind all conversions and make data-driven decisions regarding future campaigns.
Adobe Analytics works best for businesses of any size that need a platform that will help them mix, match, and analyze data from the entire customer journey. The platform supports multi-channel data collection from the web, email, campaign, and mobile device sources. The Analysis Workspace feature within Adobe Analytics allows you to perform impromptu analysis by clicking and dragging data visualizations, tables, and components to a project.
Adobe Analytics Standout Features and Integrations
Features include attribution modeling, cross-channel attribution, customer journey tracking, multi-channel data collection, predictive analytics, and website analytics.
Integrations include Amplitude, Analytics Intelligence, Convert Experiences, Extole, Hootsuite, Improvado, Insightech, LeadPerfection, Publitas, Rambox, Rank Ranger, Signal AI, Skai, Uptempo, Vidyard, and other software options.
Adobe Analytics offers custom pricing upon request. You can also ask for a free demo.
Pros
- Easy to navigate
- Loads data fast
- The dashboards are customizable
Cons
- Some tracking information isn’t understandable
- The number of features makes it overwhelming
3. Salesforce Analytics Cloud - Best for analyzing data with AI
Salesforce Analytics Cloud provides AI capabilities that can gather and process marketing data to deliver deeper campaign understanding.
Why I picked Salesforce Analytics Cloud: With Salesforce Analytics Cloud, you can use AI to get intelligent predictions, recommendations, and flows to discover answers to vital business questions. Salesforce Analytics Cloud can collect and analyze every interaction that customers and potential buyers have with your organization across every marketing channel, on any device. The platform will provide marketing analytics visualizations and allow you to explore your data with automated insights.
Salesforce Analytics Cloud is suitable for any sized business that wants to optimize its marketing performance based on marketing intelligence. It’s especially beneficial for businesses that are already using Salesforce to manage other business functions. You can use Salesforce Analytics Cloud to see which tactics are generating the most engagement for your business and provides the most revenue.
Salesforce Analytics Cloud Standout Features and Integrations
Features include data visualization, high-volume processing, predictive analytics, ad-hoc reports, benchmarking, data warehousing, performance metrics, strategic planning tools, data analysis, trend and problem indicators, and dashboard creation.
Integrations include Amp Impact, BlueSnap, Dataddo, FinancialForce Accounting, Inspire Planner, Knowi, Marchex, OmniConnect, ONEcount, RenderDraw, Salesforce, Secuvy AI, Tavant Warranty, Wufoo, Zapier, and other software options.
Salesforce Analytics Cloud offers custom pricing upon request. Salesforce Analytics Cloud provides a free 30-day trial for new subscribers.
Pros
- Excellent out-of-the-box reporting
- It provides a complete marketing channel analysis
- A very robust and powerful platform
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Large amounts of data can slow the platform down
4. HubSpot - Best for social media analytics
HubSpot provides marketing analytics tools that can help businesses monitor social media performance and connect it to revenue growth.
Why I picked HubSpot: With HubSpot, you can publish content directly to the social networks you’re using and report on your social strategy’s success. HubSpot’s social media analytics provide robust data visuals that break down numbers, such as session lengths, audiences, and impressions. You can also compare the performance of all your social channels to measure performance.
HubSpot helps businesses that need an all-in-one marketing tool to bring all their marketing efforts together and increase conversions. HubSpot will give your business all the analytics you need in everything you do and track your entire customer lifecycle, from anonymous visitors to closed deals. You can use the software’s in-depth analytics to drill down into each data source and see what’s performing the best so you can focus on the best channels.
HubSpot Standout Features and Integrations
Features include ad retargeting, marketing automation, landing page reporting, contact management, live chat, email marketing, SEO, social media management, custom reporting, account-based marketing, predictive lead scoring, and multi-touch revenue attribution.
Integrations include Accelevents, Freshdesk, GetResponse, Improvado, Localize, Mailchimp, Miro, monday.com, Nutshell, Outgrow, Pipedrive, ProjectManager, Slack, Wrike, Zendesk, Zoho CRM, and other software options.
HubSpot costs from $20/month when paying monthly or $18/month when billed annually. HubSpot offers a free forever subscription plan.
Pros
- It provides an excellent interface
- It’s easy to use
- Excellent customer support
Cons
- Not many customization capabilities
- The reports can be improved
5. Mixpanel - Best event-based analytics tool
Mixpanel helps businesses track specific events on their website, mobile app, or product.
Why I picked Mixpanel: After adding the events that you want to track and focus on, Mixpanel will show you the events’ trends and counts, so you can understand what visitors are doing on your site. Afterwards, you can track the events you require after the information is added to your dashboard with all the metrics you want to see. You can choose these events in the Mixpanel platform via code annotations that you can add or through the tool’s visual selector.
Mixpanel is a robust option for organizations that need a business intelligence tool that will monitor how users interact with their sites. It focuses on tracking and evaluating customer journeys, including their behaviors, trends, and habits. Mixpanel is especially beneficial for ecommerce store owners because it provides significant data volumes regarding each stage of your funnels and how customers impact them.
Mixpanel Standout Features and Integrations
Features include audience targeting, campaign segmentation, split testing, test scheduling, feedback collection, community management, predictive analytics, data visualization, high-volume data processing, customer journey mapping, and campaign management.
Integrations include AB Tasty, CallRail, Figma, Google Cloud, Help Scout, Hightouch, HubSpot, Intercom, Kameleoon, Mailchimp, Optimizely, Revel Digital, Workato, Zapier, Zoho Commerce, and other software options.
Mixpanel costs from $20/month for up to 100 million monthly events. Mixpanel offers a free forever plan with limited features.
Pros
- Simple to understand
- The data is easy to access
- The user interface is intuitive
Cons
- Reports don’t format properly in PDFs
- There are delays in showing data sometimes
6. Kissmetrics - Best for content marketing analytics
Kissmetrics can help businesses monitor customers’ actions and behaviors toward their content.
Why I picked Kissmetrics: The platform focuses on providing behavior analytics, which is helpful in understanding how visitors react to your content marketing strategies. Kissmetrics allows you to monitor your audiences’ journeys and learn how to optimize your content to keep them coming back. The system lets you create effective A/B tests to help you see how any changes you make to your content perform compared to the original piece, so you can choose the best variations to reach your goals.
Kissmetrics is an excellent choice for marketers that need a robust marketing analytics tool that will cater to their needs. You can leverage the data the platform provides to increase conversions, customer engagement, and general marketing campaign success. Kissmetrics does this via its cognitive analytics feature that enables you to understand how visitors engage with every aspect of your website and lets you see what’s working well so you can make the necessary changes to improve experiences.
Kissmetrics Standout Features and Integrations
Features include campaign management, conversion tracking, multiple site management, goal tracking, referral source tracking, page view tracking, and visitor interaction tracking.
Integrations include CallRail, CallTrackingMetrics, Chameleon, GetResponse, HubSpot CRM, LiveChat, Mailchimp, Marketo, Rambox, Shift, Slack, VWO Insights, Workato, Wrike, YesInsights, and other software options.
Kissmetrics costs from $299/month, billed annually. Kissmetrics offers a free 30-day trial for new subscribers.
Pros
- Excellent tracking capabilities
- Great customization options
- Safely provides extensive amounts of data
Cons
- There’s a steep learning curve
- Customer support needs improvement
7. Amplitude - Best for digital products
Amplitude helps digital product owners understand the actions users take and identify areas that need to be optimized to increase conversions.
Why I picked Amplitude: The platform allows you to see user flow data for your digital product and identify which actions users most commonly take after signing up. Amplitude can help you measure in-app conversion rates and identify points in your funnel where users are dropping off during your sign-up, upgrade, or purchase processes. You can use the software to segment users into various groups and compare each group’s conversion, engagement, retention rates, and other vital datasets against the rest on the same dashboard.
Amplitude is suitable for organizations of any size that want an intelligence platform that will help them understand their digital products’ users. You can use the platform to understand your users’ behavior, enhance experiences, and retain customers. Amplitude provides a tool that your product intelligence teams can use to get the data and insights necessary to develop excellent product experiences at scale.
Amplitude Standout Features and Integrations
Features include funnel development and analysis, audience segmentation, retention tracking, cohort analysis, data tables, lifetime value analysis, data dashboards, session analysis, conversion optimization, targeted experiments, and behavioral analytics.
Integrations include 1Flow, Adapty, Airship, Bento, BigQuery, Census, Chameleon, Cordial, Datagrail, Enterpret, Flagsmith, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Intercom, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Marketo, Notion, Optimizely, and other software options.
Amplitude offers custom pricing upon request. Amplitude provides a free plan for startups and small teams for a year.
Pros
- Easy to implement
- Provides extensive data visualizations
- User-friendly interface
Cons
- Documentation is scattered between multiple sites
- Updates can negatively impact features
8. Crazy Egg - Best for tracking website visitors’ interactions
Crazy Egg helps businesses track how every visitor interacts with their website and get an idea of where they click and how far they scroll down.
Why I picked Crazy Egg: You can use Crazy Egg to take a snapshot of how visitors interact with your website and generate easy-to-read reports that show their behaviors. The software can record visits and learn how people are using your site and see where they might be getting stuck and why it happens. With this information, you can get an excellent understanding of your site’s design and how visitors interact with various elements and the website’s layout.
Crazy Egg works well for businesses of all sizes that need a tool to help them make their websites better. The platform’s A/B testing feature allows you to know with certainty that you picked the right content, color, image, placement, or copy, so your website can convert more visitors into customers. Crazy Egg also provides an editing tool that helps you change your website’s elements, such as colors and fonts, or hide them so you can see how it impacts conversions.
Crazy Egg Standout Features and Integrations
Features include campaign segmentation, split testing, statistical relevance analysis, heatmaps, funnel analysis, a visual editor, behavioral mapping, data dashboards, element analytics, website analytics, dynamic maps, and radial mapping.
Integrations include Convert Experiences, Drupal, Handshake, Joomla, Kameleoon, Magento, Optimizely, Rippling, Shopify, Sitejet, Squarespace, SurveyMonkey, Teamstack, Wix, WordPress, and other software options.
Crazy Egg offers custom pricing upon request. Crazy Egg provides a free 30-day trial for new subscribers.
Pros
- The snapshot analytics is very beneficial
- The survey service is easy to use
- Responsive customer support
Cons
- The user interface needs improvement
- Similar software has more features
9. Heap - Best for behavior analytics
Heap helps businesses understand their customers’ complete journeys to help optimize experiences.
Why I picked Heap: The platform will automatically track all website visitors’ behaviors and lets you choose what you want to analyze and preview in your dashboard. Heap will also let you track individual visitors’ behavior and segment them based on their actions. Heap provides a retroactive function that tracks and remembers all activity from each visitor from the time you implement the software on your site, which means their behaviors are available and ready for analysis, even if they weren’t what you initially chose to track.
Heap is suitable for any sized business that needs in-depth information about its website, products, or iOS app activities and conversions. It helps you quickly identify blind spots in your marketing funnels and become aware of where and when to make website improvements. Heap is a beneficial tool to use if you need to get to the bottom of why people engage with your website and test new ideas when you have any.
Heap Standout Features and Integrations
Features include ad-hoc reports, data analysis, key performance indicators, visual analytics, data dashboards, trend and problem indicators, filtered views, forecasting tools, marketing reports, data source connectors, and report exporting.
Integrations include Appcues, BigMarker, Chameleon, Contentsquare, Convert Experiences, Feathery, Flagsmith, Gigasheet, Pipedream, Product Fruits, Rambox, Rippling, Shift, Sitejet, Xplenty, and other software options.
Heap offers custom pricing upon request. Heap provides a free forever plan.
Pros
- It provides an extensive amount of information
- The dashboards are customizable
- The user interface is simple
Cons
- The number of features is overwhelming
- It’s not effective at highlighting data patterns
10. Optimizely - Best for website A/B testing
Optimizely helps businesses perform A/B tests on their websites and products to help them understand which version is best.
Why I picked Optimizely: It uses visual or textual A/B tests to make it simple for you to change your webpage’s designs without changing its code. Optimizely allows you to evaluate visitor touchpoints to collect insights so you can optimize experiences. The software’s Web Experimentation enables you to run website tests, and the Feature Experimentation helps justify new features so you can deploy quality releases.
Optimizely is suitable for ecommerce businesses of any size that need help increasing sales and ROI. Your ecommerce store can use the tool’s functionality to manage your entire business. For example, Optimizely provides an AI that can provide personalized experiences and product recommendations. Also, the Content Management Feature helps you improve digital experiences and manage the entire content lifecycle.
Optimizely Standout Features and Integrations
Features include audience targeting, campaign segmentation, split testing, test scheduling, a visual editor, multivariate testing, testing management, a visual interface, real-time editing, user interface testing, mobile testing, and contextual targeting.
Integrations include Adobe Experience Manager, Aprimo, Bynder, Contentsquare, Google Analytics, Hawksearch, Luminosity Reviews, Marketo Publishing, Privy, Salesforce, Seismic, SEO Toolbox, Slack, Sprout Social, WordPress, and other software options.
Optimizely offers custom pricing upon request. Optimizely doesn’t provide any free trial information.
Pros
- The UI is easy to use and intuitive
- Strong customer support
- It provides an extensive knowledge base
Cons
- The reports are lacking
- It doesn’t experiment with specific pages
11. Hootsuite Insights - Best social listening tool
Hootsuite Insight provides an overview of real-time customer conversations across social media channels.
Why I picked Hootsuite Insights: The platform is a popular choice for its social media publishing and engagement tools, but it offers analytics capabilities that allow you to make sense of what audiences are saying about your brand. The information that Hootsuite Insights provides can quickly give you a boost in engagement after acting on the information you receive. With these details, you can create intelligent social media strategies and simplify audience research by listening to what everyone is saying about your organization.
Hootsuite Insights helps brands of all sizes that need a robust social media analytics platform. With this platform, you can easily track customer conversations and use the data to make crucial business decisions. The information from Hootsuite Insights can help you stay ahead of your competition by monitoring industry trends and measuring risks and opportunities as you monitor brand sentiment.
Hootsuite Standout Features and Integrations
Features include campaign management, sentiment analysis, social media monitoring, campaign analytics, competitor monitoring, response management, engagement tracking, multi-channel data collection, and customizable reports.
Integrations include Audiense, Brandwatch, Bynder, Constant Contact, Empiraa, Freshdesk, Mailchimp, monday.com, Orange Logic, Rambox, Salesforce, Slack, Trello, Zapier, Zendesk, and other software options.
Hootsuite Insights costs from $99/month for one user. Hootsuite Insights offers a free 30-day trial for new subscribers.
Pros
- Displays data in an understandable format
- Simple data visualizations
- Allows users to see what’s working
Cons
- It doesn’t track LinkedIn analytics well
- It’s expensive for large teams
12. SEMrush - Best for competitor analytics
SEMrush is a marketing analytics tool that helps businesses analyze competitors’ marketing strategies to identify new opportunities.
Why I picked SEMrush: The software can help you learn more about your competition’s marketing strategies and how to use similar campaigns to get your target audience’s attention. SEMrush provides an analytics report tool that shows your competitor’s SEO and PPC data which you can use to help your business stand out from them. It also tracks your competition’s brands, social media pages, and other online marketing activities.
SEMrush is a great choice for marketers that want to improve their search engine campaigns and save money by preventing them from relying on unproductive search strategies. Its features include tools for tracking campaign performance, identifying the best keywords, and improving link-building efforts. SEMrush can also help enhance your content marketing strategies with its content creation, optimization, distribution tools, and content marketing data.
SEMrush Standout Features and Integrations
Features include keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, competitor SEO analysis, content marketing analytics, market analysis, competitor PR monitoring, PPC keyword research, backlink audit tools, traffic analytics, and post-tracking.
Integrations include AgencyAnalytics, AIOSEO, Bramework, Kontent.ai, LongShot, Outranking, PageCloud, Plerdy, Renderforest, Rytr, Scalenut, Umbraco, Wix, Writesonic, Zoho, and other software options.
SEMrush costs from $119.95/month when paying monthly or $99.95/month when billed annually. SEMrush offers a free 7-day trial.
Pros
- It offers an extensive amount of data
- It provides valuable insights
- User-friendly interface
Cons
- Some information is difficult to find
- It has a steep learning curve
Other Options
Here are a few more options that didn’t make the best marketing analytics tools list:
- Funnel.io - Best for analyzing customer journeys
- Ahrefs - Best all-in-one marketing analytics tool
- Moz Pro - Best for SEO analysis
- Clicky - Best for analyzing website use
- Piwik PRO - Best analytics suite
- BuzzSumo - Best for social media influencer analytics
- Mention - Best for monitoring online conversations
- Sprout Social - Best for real-time social media marketing data
- Brandwatch - Best for AI-enriched data
- Hotjar - Best for experience insights
Other Types of Marketing Tools
Marketing tools and software are significantly beneficial to a growing organization. Without these tools, manual tasks, strategy planning, campaign management, and other vital functions will become demanding and time-consuming. But you can use these marketing tools to handle multiple marketing functions to enhance your performance and results.
- Marketing Tools
- Marketing Analytics Software
- Marketing Dashboard Software
- Social Media Management Software
- Social Media Analytics Tools
How I Selected the Best Marketing Analytics Tools
Perhaps you're wondering how I selected the best marketing analytics tools for this list? To build this list, I evaluated and compared a wide range of marketing analytics tools with positive user ratings.
After determining my long list of top choices, I further honed my list by using the selection criteria below to see how each platform stacked up against the next one. I also drew on my years of marketing operations experience to pinpoint the features that add a lot of value.
Selection Criteria
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best marketing analytics tools for this article:
Core Functionality:
Marketing analytics tools will cover a variety of niches and have a variety of feature particularities. However, in order to make it on this list they must cover the following functionality criteria:
- Ability to pull data from a variety of marketing platforms and sources
- Ability to create customizable visualizations and dashboards that display metrics of your choosing
- Ability to input numerical goals and measure your progress towards them
Key Features:
Marketing analytics tools will help you make crucial decisions regarding everything from ad spend to product trends, branding, and other valuable information. In any case, you should consider using marketing analytics that can provide one or more of the following features.
- Product Intelligence: Understanding how your products stack up in your market is beneficial, and your marketing analytics tool can collect information from polls, questionnaires, or surveys to help you align your products to consumers’ interests.
- Website Analytics: This will help you track your visitors’ activity while on your website, so you can analyze your site’s performance and measure your marketing campaign’s impact on online traffic and lead conversion.
- Attribution Analytics: Similar to website analytics, attribution analytics will monitor website activity but will break down the barrier between marketing and sales by showing you which channels are increasing revenue.
- Call Analytics: Tracking call metrics helps you track which keywords, ads, or campaigns are encouraging audiences to call your company.
- Social Media Analytics: With social media analytics, you can see which campaigns increase conversion rates and create the best results.
- Customer Journey Tracking: This lets you track potential customers throughout multiple touchpoints in a funnel.
- Offline Conversion Tracking: Your marketing analytics tool should help you track the impact of your digital marketing campaigns, channels, and ads on offline sales and leads.
- Live Chat Tracking: Many website visitors will want to speak to someone via live chat to get more information about your company or product, and your marketing analytics platform can help track chat conversion events to the click that started the interaction.
- Keyword Conversion Tracking: This will track which organic keywords are resulting in conversions and revenue to help you with future content marketing decisions and improve your bottom line.
- Data Visualization: Your marketing analytics software should help provide a visual way to interpret and present data to make it easy for you to understand insights and other valuable details that are revealed by analysis.
Ease of Use:
Data harmonization, mapping, and unification are challenging processes to perform manually. So, it’s beneficial to use a marketing analytics platform that doesn’t add to the complexity. This means investing in a tool that’s easy to use and allows your teams to perform better on multiple marketing channels.
Software Integrations:
Integrating with other systems to analyze data is a crucial part of the marketing analytics process. Organizations typically use various software to manage operations and marketing analytics tools need to connect to these systems to analyze the data they provide. Before implementing a new analytics platform, checking how it can integrate with your current tools to help you collect, correlate, and analyze data in one centralized area is valuable.
Value for Price:
As you can see above, most marketing analytics tools are subscription-based, whereas other prices depend on your company’s size. Considering your team’s size is crucial to determine which is the better option. Also, some options have extra add-ons and updates available, some for free and others for an extra cost, which you should keep in mind. You might also notice some options provide custom prices, so it will be up to you to determine a price range if you’re interested in the platform.
People Also Ask
Here are a few popular questions answered for your convenience!
What are the benefits of using marketing analytics tools?
What are the 4 different kinds of marketing analytics?
What is an example of marketing analytics?
Analyzing the Best Marketing Analytics Tools
As you now know, there are numerous marketing analytics tools available for your business that will suit your needs. These platforms will manage, analyze, and measure your marketing campaign’s performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize ROI. They’ll help you identify the success of specific campaign activities and help you determine future patterns that can result in successful conversions.
This list will get you started on your journey to managing all marketing analytics, but there are also other aspects of your marketing that you can focus on. If you need help optimizing your entire marketing department, sign up for The CMO newsletter. After subscribing, you’ll receive advice and software recommendations to help increase your marketing performance.